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Thursday, June 29, 2017

Industrial Engineering is Kaizen Engineering

The word Kaizen was used by American and Japanese marketers to promote supervisory training and productivity improvement techniques. But the word "Kaizen" has become so popular that we can use it to describe and promote Industrial Engineering.

Industrial Engineering is Kaizen Engineering.

Why? The core engineering component of industrial engineering is redesign of products and processes to increase productivity. It means industrial engineering is change engineering. It is good change engineering. Industrial Engineering is Kaizen Engineering.

The word "Kaizen" became popular because industrial engineers used in Japan to promote IE. But the entire world may understand IE better today as Kaizen Engineering.

How Kaizens are visualized by operators, supervisors, engineers, managers and industrial engineers.

Kaizens start in observation. Then the identification occurs. Time and effort go into thinking about finding a solution to the problem that is causing waste. Root cause analysis is part of kaizen problem solving thinking process. A solution emerges after some period of problem solving effort. It is tried on models and on in the actual production situation. If successful, it is reported. It becomes part of the standard process after evaluation by some senior or more experienced people. Then it is promoted among all the operators using the same process.

So we can think of Kaizen Sale in the marketing and selling terminology. We alread said "Kaizen Research" which is similar to market research. It is actually market research. Kaizen developer has to do customer research.